- 93% of Democrats support gun background checks.
- 89% of Republicans support gun background checks
- 86% of gun-owning families support background checks.
- 74% of NRA members support background checks
- 54% of the Senate supports gun background checks.
- Amount NRA gave to Congress to keep them voting against the will of the public, from 2003 to 2012: $2,877,307
NEW POLL STATS:
Three Guiding Themes
It occurs to me that there are at least three (maybe more) guiding themes in our national economic debate.
One is that the deficit that will begin to strain us in fifteen years or so, is more important than any other problem facing our economy today. And that in order to avoid fixing it by raising taxes on all of us (to, say, pay for increases in health care costs), the only way we can address it is by putting a huge burden on certain target groups (the poor, the elderly, the sick and US infrastructure).
One is that the deficit that will begin to strain us in fifteen years or so, is more important than any other problem facing our economy today. And that in order to avoid fixing it by raising taxes on all of us (to, say, pay for increases in health care costs), the only way we can address it is by putting a huge burden on certain target groups (the poor, the elderly, the sick and US infrastructure).
That’s not true, of course, and nearly every economist who studies the
subject could tell you that. On the one hand, no one denies that the deficit has grown
dramatically in recent years (mainly due to tax cuts and wars of the early
2000s, and the recession of 2008) and should be addressed, but addressing it now,
during a “jobs recession” (7-8% unemployment), is damaging, irresponsible
nonsense. I’m sure that there are a few economists around the country who would
disagree with that, but they are nowhere close to a majority. When there aren’t enough jobs to go around,
cutting even more jobs and incomes, is foolish. It is the last thing you want
to do to fix the problem.
The second is the related belief that the best way to get our people back
working again is by cutting funding on programs for old people, poor people and
sick people and physical infrastructure. This belief says that if we cut spending
for the health care, income, retirement, or jobs, for a large percentage of our
population, then we’ll (eventually) be okay. Instead of solving our deficit
problem by spreading around the pain just a little bit on all of us (read: tax
increase), we should pick certain target groups (read: old, sick, and poor) and
have them carry the load for us.[1]
This, too, is wrong. You can see that objectively by looking at how slow
our recovery has been in the last four years. In spite of the fact that the
private sector has begun to claw back, the economy over all has still been
sluggish because of the huge numbers of people fired or cut back by state and
local governments. Their cut backs have taken large numbers of people out of
the market. Those people are not buying things and that keeps the economy from
growing.
And look at the draconian austerity programs in Europe. The wealthy
countries have forced such deep cuts on the poor countries that unemployment
has exploded, causing tax revenue to collapse, such that instead of lowering
the deficit through lower expenditures, they have actually increased the deficit
because of fewer number of tax payers. If you use cut backs to lower the
deficit, you usually have to make at least three rounds of cuts to get the
spending down below income. When you make massive layoffs, you lower your
expenditures, but you also lower the number of job holders who pay the taxes
that pay down the deficit. So the deficit goes up, even though your out-go has
gone down. You have to make three or four slashes of jobs and livelihoods and
families in order to have the shrunken, dysfunctional government that can be
balanced by cutbacks only. Again, look at Greece or the repeated rounds of cuts
to jobs, salaries and pensions in our state and local governments to see this
in action.
The problem in a recession is too few jobs. People are out of work, so
they don’t pay income taxes and they don’t buy things, so they don’t pay sales
taxes. And that drives up the deficit because their tax money is not going into
the government and the government is paying out in food stamps, unemployment,
etc. When people are out of work and not buying, then the merchants are not
making anything and they don’t restock or hire new people. So, it “trickles”
down to the plants and farmers. The only entity large enough to put people to
work is the government, so it needs to step in and do some spending and hiring
and put people back to work as a stimulus to the merchants, plants and farms. Once
they start seeing more cash in their pockets, they’ll spend more, and the
merchants will hire more workers and buy more from the wholesalers, etc. Until
finally the economy can manage on its own. This is not rocket science.
Trying to make big federal cuts in the budget deficit right now would
throw the economy back into a recession, which will enlarge, not shrink, the
deficit, just as it has done in Greece and Italy, and just as it did in the
American state and local governments. Firing people lowers demand and lowers
government income from taxes, which drags on the economy.
The third guiding concept is that “Supply-side” economics, the theory
that if you give more and more tax cuts and benefits to large corporations and
wealthy individuals, it will eventually “trickle down” to the average worker,
because the wealthy and corporations are America’s “Job Creators.” I think that
on this theory, the percentage of economists who would agree with this notion
would slide down to almost zero. You can see some now and then being
interviewed on Fox News, but in the real world, they are extremely rare.
Large corporations are simply not the major engines of growth for jobs.
Corporations hire people when the streets are filled with people with money in
their pockets who are demanding their products. The idea that a corporation
would hire thousands of new workers in the middle of a job recession, in the
hopes that people would buy their items even before they have incomes, is not
just illogical, it can also be proven wrong easily by the research.
Historically corporations only hire when the economy is on the upswing.
Companies do not create jobs on the
hopes that the economy might get better
by their doing it.
Now, this is not to say that some new companies are not starting up.
There are a lot of entrepreneurs out there who have an idea for a niche that
has not yet been filled. But (a) they are not the giant corporations that many
in congress have worked so hard to create tax breaks for, and (b) they often
survive because they found a niche market that no one has yet gotten into. They
are not a giant corporation that just decides to hire people in the belief that
unemployed people will buy their product.
If more people have jobs, they will pay taxes and buy things and
merchants can stay afloat and stock supplies and buy from wholesalers, and
manufacturers will take on new people to meet the demand, who will in turn go
out and buy things etc., and the economy will start to get back on its feet. An
economy grows from demand, not supply. You can “supply” all the goods in the
world to the market, but if there are no “demand” (partly because the
government has fired workers and cut pensions and salaries), then the economy
is not going to recover.
Finally, with so much of our national wealth being held in the hands of
so few, there is less to go around for the “real” economy down on the ground.
That’s not precisely true, because money is fungible and can be created, but for
the last thirty years, such a huge amount of money has been sucked up into such
a very few number of hands, that the end result has actually been not enough
money to go around to fund jobs. Too many people needing incomes, but not
enough money to fund them. Too few dollars being chased by too many job
seekers.
One thing that needs to be done is to return the tax cuts to the levels
they were before the Bush administration. It’s hard to believe this, because
it’s seldom reported, but there are a good number of very conservative
economists (Alan Greenspan, David Stockman, etc.) who now argue that the tax
cuts were a mistake and we need to revoke them. All of them.
Second, we need to create a nation-wide jobs program to get America
back to work and stimulate the economy, paid for by the money that we will now
have from the return of tax income.
Which is to say, we should be doing exactly the opposite of what we are
now doing, which is cutting spending and cutting taxes. Or to put it another
way, what we are doing is cutting growth and cutting income. Or, to borrow an
over worked, over blown phrase, we have declared a “war on” growth for America.
[1] I’m saying “cutting funding
on…” these programs, but as many Republicans and Libertarians point out,
few people are actually proposing cutting those programs; they are proposing
cutting the growth of spending on
those programs. And they ridicule liberals and Democrats for saying the
programs will be cut. What they are actually proposing are cuts in the growth of those programs down to below
the growth of the cost of living. That distinction should be made clear. So that,
say, the economy may grow at three percent and Republicans propose cutting the
growth of Medicare to just two percent. It is still growing, just not enough for
someone to pay the bills. They are right to claim that they are not cutting the
program and still allowing the program to grow, though that is a distinction
lost on the eighty-five year-old blind paraplegic widow in Cincinnati, who now
has to pull the extra one percent for her meds out of her food budget.
Lenten Journey in the Sonora
A few years ago I was visiting a little town called El Bosque, up in the mountains of southern
Mexico, about two hours north of Tuxtla Gutiérrez. I was traveling with the interfaith fair trade
organization, Equal Exchange, and we were studying coffee farming and marketing
crafts for churches in the states. While I was there, I met the families of two
young people, Daniel Hernández and Jasmine Díaz-Pérez. They would have been about
nineteen when I was there, and had just gotten engaged. Their parents were
wonderful, hard working people, and their families had been growing corn and
beans and coffee in that region for over a hundred years.
However, in 1989 that began to change. Before then prices for
coffee beans had been set by an “International Coffee Agreement,” led by the
US. We had created the agreement back in the sixties as a way of providing poor
farmers in Latin America with just enough income to keep them from joining
rebel movements like Fidel Castro’s in Cuba. But in 1989, Cuba was hit hard by
the collapse of the Soviet Union and the US pulled out of the Agreement,
allowing coffee prices to swing wildly on the open market. Within three years prices
paid to poor farmers had fallen to a thirty-year low. According to World Bank
numbers, over 600,000 people lost their jobs and homes in Central America and
Mexico alone.
In addition, after 1994, when the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA)
took effect, allowing the US to export cheap, subsidized corn into Mexico, their
sales of corn also collapsed. Local prices fell from an average of $5 a bushel
in 1995 to $1.80 in 2000, and it wiped out tens of thousands of farmers.
With each economic hit, the Mexican countryside emptied out
more young people creating abandoned ghost towns in its swath.
Some of those farmers were from Daniel’s family, and the
summer before we arrived, their conditions had gotten so bad that many decided
they had to leave. The options weren’t good. They could join the rebels,
migrate to the sweat shops, grow cocaine, or put together a delegation to make
that terrifying journey north into the US to find work. Typically if a group managed
to get in they’d rent a room together, take turns sleeping and working, eat as
little as possible, and send money back home. One day’s work, picking
vegetables in California, at below minimum wage, could feed a family of six in El
Bosque for a week.
So, they chose six young men who would go north and try to
get in. One problem was that Daniel was one of those, and he and Jasmine had
just gotten engaged, and they couldn’t stand being apart. Maybe they could go
together, they said, and both find jobs? Maybe they could afford a place of
their own. Maybe they could finally get married… So the family relented and Jasmine
was added to the group, and then they left.
They walked north along the spine of the westward side of the
Sierra Madre Mountains, sometimes hitchhiking, but mainly walking for almost three
weeks. Then, exhausted and nearly broke, they stopped at the town of Altar,
Mexico, about sixty miles south of the border, where they hired a coyote. “Coyotes” are those often unscrupulous people who, for a fee, will
smuggle people like cargo over the border. Whether the families succeed or
fail, the coyote still gets paid.
Typically, they don’t really care.
But he shouldn’t have. They were too weak, the journey had
been too long, and the heat was too evil. After three days they collapsed and couldn’t
travel any further. And about 100 miles southwest of Tucson on the Tohono O’odham
Indian Reservation the coyote abandoned
them. Daniel and two of Jasmine’s uncles struggled on ahead to search for help.
They turned themselves in to border guards and then led them back to the
others.
When they got back they found everyone in critical condition,
weak from heat and dehydration. Two recovered within a few days. Two more were
placed in intensive care but recovered. But young Jasmine, Daniel’s fiancé, didn’t
make it. They tried to resuscitate her at the hospital, but she was already
gone. Daniel survived but no one knows where he is. They say he ran screaming
from the hospital when he got the news, and there’s no word on what happened to
him since. He never made it back home. He never contacted anyone about getting
a job. He simply disappeared, in grief.
I don’t know how to solve our complex story of immigration. I
can’t begin to work through all the legal and historical issues that brought us
to where we are today. What I do know is that Jasmine and Daniel are not our
enemies. They didn’t come here to hurt us, or take our jobs, or soak up our tax
dollars. They came here because they were hungry, because they were desperate,
and because they loved each other. Their lives were caught up in economic
forces that were larger than they were, and over which they had no control.
And I know that little Jasmine died for our sins. She died so
that we could continue to worship a market system that destroys families and
crushes human beings far away, so that we can live well here at home…a system
that forces wages down so that we can drink cheap coffee and wear cheap shirts,
and forces immigration up so that our
farms and services can have cheap labor. Whatever we decide to do in the next
months about immigration, we should never, ever blame those who are drawn to
the American dream and risk their lives trying to attain it.
And I know that whatever punishment the judge gave to the coyote who abandoned them in the Sonora
desert, at the end of the day, you and I and all of our families are
co-conspirators in the crime.
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The Conumbrum
February 5, 2013
The painful and difficult irony with Republicans is that they
absolutely must strengthen their
support from women and Hispanics if they have any hope of winning the next generation
of presidential elections. Both of those groups overwhelmingly went for Obama
in the last election out of outrage over what they perceived to be misogynistic
and jingoistic comments from Republican candidates. Some of those comments,
like Todd Akin saying that a woman’s body had some mysterious power to “shut down”
and not produce a baby, if the woman had been raped legitimately, were
borderline psychotic. Some of them, like Mitt Romney’s comment that we plan on
making life for undocumented foreigners so miserable and painful that they
would eventually decide to “self deport,” i.e. leave the country to get some
relief from the oppression, were flat-out cruel.
But at the same time, 96 percent of all
Republican districts are solid, locked down, Republican districts. And the
representatives of those districts are far more concerned about being attacked
in the next primary from someone from the far(ther) right than they are
concerned about who is in the White House. So, to protect their jobs, they have
to vote against what is good for the national party. To do what is good for Republicans
in general, is to do what is not good
for their own re-election prospects. To do what is good for their re-election
is to do what is not good for the party. Crazy statements at home will get them
re-elected. Crazy statements on a national scale will get Hilary elected.
How to get out of that conundrum is something that no one in the Republican party has yet figured out.
Even then...
Stan G. Duncan[1]
Even if my strength fails me
and my appetite goes away,
Even if my bones ache with a pain
that the drugs can never touch,
Even if the blessed tests come back again and again,
and the charts tell me that I have failed the task of
banishing the dark gray Kryptonite from within my spine,
Even if I fall and fall again and the doctor,
who is younger than my youngest child,
tells me I will never walk again,
Even if my bowels collapse and nothing short of the
indignity of a large young woman
who shouts my name and pronounces it wrong,
must wipe me clean and change my clothes,
day after day after day,
Even if all of the doors of life are closed again and again
and the tests come back again and again,
and my time has passed, and I know that will eventually die,
perhaps finally and completely…
Even then, I will not give in. I will not give in to the beastly
reality that is closing in around me.
I will not let the darkness of the future decide for me whether I
am permitted to smile.
I will not allow the “sting” of death force me to give up my claim,
my right,
my inheritance,
of joy.
[1] Originally published as S. Duncan Granot, The Christian Century, spring, 1992
Even if my strength fails me
and my appetite goes away,
Even if my bones ache with a pain
that the drugs can never touch,
Even if the blessed tests come back again and again,
and the charts tell me that I have failed the task of
banishing the dark gray Kryptonite from within my spine,
Even if I fall and fall again and the doctor,
who is younger than my youngest child,
tells me I will never walk again,
Even if my bowels collapse and nothing short of the
indignity of a large young woman
who shouts my name and pronounces it wrong,
must wipe me clean and change my clothes,
day after day after day,
Even if all of the doors of life are closed again and again
and the tests come back again and again,
and my time has passed, and I know that will eventually die,
perhaps finally and completely…
Even then, I will not give in. I will not give in to the beastly
reality that is closing in around me.
I will not let the darkness of the future decide for me whether I
am permitted to smile.
I will not allow the “sting” of death force me to give up my claim,
my right,
my inheritance,
of joy.
[1] Originally published as S. Duncan Granot, The Christian Century, spring, 1992
After Elizabeth Warren Calls Them Out, AIG Drops Its Threat Of Suing The Government
From boldprogressives.org, January 9, 2013, by Zaid Jilani
Earlier this week, it was reported that AIG would reward taxpayers for their$182 billion bailout by suing the government over the terms of the rescue.
Elizabeth Warren immediately called out AIG and condemned its behavior:
Beginning in 2008, the federal government poured billions of dollars into AIG to save it from bankruptcy. AIG’s reckless bets nearly crashed our entire economy. Taxpayers across this country saved AIG from ruin, and it would be outrageous for this company to turn around and sue the federal government because they think the deal wasn’t generous enough,” said Warren in a statement. “Even today, the government provides an ongoing, stealth bailout, propping up AIG with special tax breaks — tax breaks that Congress should stop. AIG should thank American taxpayers for their help, not bite the hand that fed them for helping them out in a crisis.
Politico reports this afternoon that AIG’s board met and decided not to join the lawsuit being considered, representing an early victory for Warren and, by extension, American taxpayers.
“It’s just like someone maybe who is drowning in the water and who is saved by some hero and then says, ‘Hey, while you were saving me, you choked me a little bit. So I’m going to sue you.’ That’s simply what AIG is doing. Yesterday, Elizabeth Warren came out very publicly,” explained Progressive Change Campaign Committee co-founder Adam Green on C-SPAN this morning. ”She’s not just keeping her head down, she’s keeping it straight, front and center and said, ‘This is absolutely wrong, this is unconscionable.’ And I think it’s a real breath of fresh air, that someone didn’t use weasly words and beat around the bush but to say bad corporate action is bad corporate action.” Watch it:
Click here to show your support for Elizabeth Warren’s policy vision calling for a “balanced approach” that makes the rich pay their fair share while protecting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits.
Posted on January 9, 2013 at 4:37pm by Zaid Jilani
http://boldprogressives.org/after-elizabeth-warren-calls-them-out-aig-drops-its-threat-of-suing-the-government/?source=reddit-politics#.UPAJXW_LSVK
Where are we financially right now in terms of our deficit?
The
deficit itself, as you may recall came about in two phases. The first was in
the early 2000s, with unfunded wars, unfunded tax cuts, and unfunded
prescription drug programs. It was then compounded in the later 2000s by a
recession where millions of people lost jobs or pay and were no longer able to
pay into the federal coffers, plus things like food stamps and unemployment
insurance shot up. On top of that we had two stimulus programs, one for banks
and one supposedly for jobs but about a third of which was more tax cuts. So, we
went from a surplus in 2000 to a deficit of about $15 Trillion (and still
counting) today. The costs of the wars will continue to rise for some years to
come because of the need for on-going health care for wounded veterans. It is estimated
that their care will cost about $1 trillion in “out of control spending” every
three years for at least the next two decades.
So,
where are we on tackling that decade’s deficit (assuming that we need to; that
is not a universally held opinion)?
Through
the December 31 fiscal cliff deal and the spring 2011 debt ceiling deal
Congress effectively cut at least $1.5 trillion over the next decade. Not bad.
Add
to that the $600 billion in new revenue raised
in the fiscal cliff deal and the $700 billion in reduced Medicare spending passed
in the Affordable Care Act. That brings it down by about $3 Trillion, which is not everything, but
it’s not nothing. And the total will actually wind up being higher than that when
the reductions in interest payments on a smaller debt are included.
And finally, the deficit is also gradually coming down as more and more people are going back to work and beginning to pay taxes again. One of the reasons why the deficit became a surplus back in the dark days of the Communist, Socialist, reign of bill Clinton was that unemployment went down and the number of tax payers went up.
And finally, the deficit is also gradually coming down as more and more people are going back to work and beginning to pay taxes again. One of the reasons why the deficit became a surplus back in the dark days of the Communist, Socialist, reign of bill Clinton was that unemployment went down and the number of tax payers went up.
There
is a clear correlation between the number of tax payers in a nation and the size
of its national deficit. The more people paying taxes, the smaller the deficit
(see this chart). Most, if not all economists would, therefore, argue that that
the best way to tackle the deficit would be a balanced program that combines increasing taxes with increasing tax payers.
Unfortunately,
according to the people in Congress who control the filibuster in the Senate
and the "Majority of the Majority" rule in the house, it’s unlikely that either
of these will ever happen. Instead of finding ways to share the burden equally (raising income taxes), what is being talked about (by both parties) is ways to put the
burden of the deficit on specific groups. that means mainly old people, poor people and sick people
(a.k.a. Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare), with a few "loopholes" like
damaging young families trying to buy a new home or parents trying to send
their kids to college, or making old people pay taxes on their pensions.
What
a wonderful system of government…
INTERESTING CHART
This chart was recently put together by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis.
It shows, among other things, the fairly simple correlation between jobs (and the tax revenue they produce) and the deficit. When unemployment goes up, the deficit goes up; when unemployment goes down, the deficit goes down.
So, here's a Pop Quiz:
(1) What do you think most economists believe is the best thing to do to tackle the deficit?
(2) What do you think Congress will do?
It shows, among other things, the fairly simple correlation between jobs (and the tax revenue they produce) and the deficit. When unemployment goes up, the deficit goes up; when unemployment goes down, the deficit goes down.
So, here's a Pop Quiz:
(1) What do you think most economists believe is the best thing to do to tackle the deficit?
(2) What do you think Congress will do?
I may be related to Mitt Romney
Reading recently a post from Ancestry.com, I noticed that
Mitt and the presidents Bush are related distantly (10th cousins, once and twice
removed respectively). And, as it happens, I am probably related to the Bushes.
Their family and my family trace their lineage back to a small town in Nottinghamshire,
Southern England, called “Gotham.” The town was famous in the 1500s for scaring
away tax collectors by feigning madness. True story. Every time King John’s army
would come through to collect a levy on a new road or royal palace, the men of
the town would do something like take all their clothes off and paint their
bodies and run naked, screaming in the streets. That terrified the collectors,
who believed that madness was contagious, and they would move on to the next
town. A series of chapbooks regaling these stories, called “The Wise Men of
Gotham,” has become famous. Washington Irving gave the name “Gotham” to New
York City in Salmagundi in 1804 (aptly
named, some would say). And DC Comics gave the name to Batman’s home town in
the 1930s so people would think of a town full of crazy people but he didn’t
actually have to say the words “New York City.”
However, assuming that there was the usual amount of hanky
panky going on in any authoritarian, stratified society, it is entirely
possible that we are cousins. In fact, if I remember the genealogy correctly and
do the math right, I am about a seventeenth cousin twice removed from the Bush
family, and therefore about a twenty-seventh cousin, fourth removed (more or
less) from the Romneys.
And, frankly, I think there are a lot of family resemblances. I’m
sure that I inherited George W. Bush’s drinking skills, Mitt’s public
speaking, and Bill Clinton's fidelity. We are definitely all from the same family.
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